Unsung heroines: Six women denied scientific glory

Emmy Noether did not lack the respect of her peers. Albert Einstein wrote in her obituary for the New York Times in 1935 that “In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”

Yet Noether suffered discrimination throughout her career because of her gender – and died in exile on grounds of her faith. Her most seminal work, the discovery of a deep connection between symmetries in nature and the form of fundamental physical laws, is 100 years old this year, and yet even among physicists is not nearly as famous as it should be. Hers is an unedifying story – yet hardly unprecedented in the history of science. Graham Lawton and Richard Webb

Lise Meitner, 1878-1968

Many elements of Emmy Noether's story are mirrored in that of Lise Meitner. As with Noether, Meitner's career was blighted by discrimination, and not just because of her sex. Meitner studied physics at the University of Vienna, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before moving to Berlin, Germany, to further her education. She attended a series of lectures by Max Planck – the first woman to be allowed to do so – and became his assistant.

She later began to work with chemist Otto Hahn, but was refused access to his laboratory and was forced to work in a broom cupboard. When Hahn's research group moved to a different institute, Meitner was offered an unpaid job as his "guest".

In 1938, because of her Jewish heritage, Meitner was forced to leave Nazi Germany. She eventually fled to Sweden, with Hahn's help. Hahn remained in Germany, but he and Meitner continued to correspond and in 1939 they discovered a process they called nuclear fission. In possibly the most egregious example of a scientist being overlooked for an award, it was Hahn who received the 1944 Nobel prize for the discovery. She was mentioned three times in the presentation speech, however, and Hahn named her nine times in his Nobel lecture.

In this 1946 photo, Meitner is lecturing at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. She had an element named after her posthumously.

(Image: Corbis)

Marthe Gautier, 1925-

In 1959, a team at the Trousseau Hospital in Paris, France, authored a brief paper that revealed the cause of Down's syndrome to be the presence of an extra chromosome. The first named author of that paper was geneticist and paediatrician Jérôme Lejeune – later to become a famed anti-abortion campaigner and for some a candidate for sainthood.

Although Marthe Gautier was named on that paper, she maintains to this day that Lejeune downplayed her contribution and that the crucial work was hers. Lejeune died in 1994, but a foundation established in his name hotly disputes Gautier's claim. In January 2014, when Gautier was due to receive a medal from the French Federation of Human Genetics for her work, an intervention by the foundation's legal representatives caused her address to be cancelled.

Hertha Ayrton, 1854-1923

Born in Portsmouth, UK, Ayrton studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, but was not eligible for a degree because of her gender. Undeterred, in 1884 she patented a draughtsman's instrument – the first of many patents. The following year she married physicist William Ayrton and assisted in his experiments on electricity. Her own work on arc lamps was used to improve aircraft searchlights in both world wars.

Ayrton was the first woman to join the British Institute of Electrical Engineers. She was also the first woman to read a paper in person to the Royal Society, but was refused a fellowship because she was married.

Like her great friend Marie Curie, she was constantly accused of riding on her husband's coat-tails. Both Ayrton and her daughter were notable suffragettes.

(Image: APIC/Getty)

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, born 1943

Born in Belfast, UK, Bell Burnell spent a lot of time during her childhood at the Armagh Planetarium, which her architect father helped to design. In 1967, as a postdoctoral physicist at the University of Cambridge, she discovered the first pulsar using a radio telescope she had built with her supervisor Antony Hewish, astronomer Martin Ryle and others. This 1968 photo shows her at the university's Mullard observatory.

Bell Burnell was the second author named on the paper that announced the discovery (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/217709a0), but it was Hewish and Ryle who received a Nobel prize for it in 1974. She has made light of this, saying that "students don't win Nobel prizes" and "an award to me would have debased the prize".

(Image: Daily Herald Archive/SSPL/Getty)

Gerty Cori, 1896-1957

Born in Prague in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Cori earned a doctorate in medicine in 1920 from Charles-Ferdinand University. Although she converted to Catholicism before her marriage that year, her family was Jewish. With anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe, she and her husband Carl (also shown here) emigrated to the US in 1922. They eventually secured positions at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases, now the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, in Buffalo, New York, and published 50 papers together.

In 1931, Carl was awarded a professorship at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Gerty was offered a lowly and poorly paid research assistant post, which she held for 12 years before being hired as an assistant professor. In 1946 she was given a full professorship, and a year later the couple shared the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine. She was the first woman to win the prize.

(Image: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty)

Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958

Born in London, Franklin graduated in chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1941. A decade later, after stints at research institutes in the US, France and the UK, she landed a job at King's College London, where she began work on the leading biological problem of the day – the structure of the DNA molecule.